Music

After Apple's iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus announcement, U2 took the stage. After that iTunes customers in over 100 countries were told they'd have access to their new album, Songs of Innocence, for free. While some people were excited about that and asking how to download it, others were less than thrilled. My colleague Peter recently expressed his distaste for the situation and while I tend to agree, I also understand some people not wanting to look at an album in their library they aren't interested in.

So here's how to hide it from even showing up not only in iTunes, but on your iPhone and iPad as well!

Yesterday's iPhone 6 and Apple Watch event kicked off with a fancy video about perspective, but rock band OK Go says the whole thing is a riff on their work shooting The Writing's on the Wall. Apple used the same director and production company as OK Go did for their music video.

Weird Al Yankovic is kicking off a full week of new songs from his album Mandatory Fun, and the first one is called "Tacky". The song lampoons the hugely popular song "Happy" by Pharell Williams, and there's a decidedly colorful music video that goes with it. Big names like Jack Black, Margaret Cho, Aisha Tyler, Kristen Schaal, and others dance shamelessly towards the camera just like in the Williams original. As always, the lyrics have been twisted in an entirely new (and hilarious) direction.

While the sheer quantity and quality of announcements made at WWDC 2014 was enough to stun a bevy of bloggers, there were some anticipated announcements that didn't materialize, things like updates to Maps and Music. So what's happening with these key apps in iOS 8? Unless and until we hear from Apple, all we have is rumor.

Amazon may be the latest entrant into the streaming music business, and could be adding the feature to its $99 per year Prime service as early as next month. According to sources of BuzzFeed, Amazon has locked up deals with two of the big three music labels (Universal Music Group is on the fence) to launch a music streaming service that would be included at no extra cost with your Amazon Prime subscription.

There's an update coming down the pike for the official Facebook app that will enable users to automatically tag the music and TV that they're listening/watching in their status updates. As demoed in the video above, the system works by tapping a button when creating a new status — not unlike the "moods" feature Facebook added last year, and then it uses audio ID software to identify the music, TV show, or movie that is blasting its sounds into your vicinity, and then tags your status with that information.

Twitter is reportedly looking to acquire SoundCloud in what could be its biggest acquisition to date. According to Re/code, which cites sources familiar with the matter, SoundCloud's 250 million consumer base is a major motivator behind the deal.

Google's Play Music All Access subscription service is now streaming in Canada! By signing up to All Access, you can get a healthy cloud library of tunes, as well as your own private collection. Us Canadians are used to these sorts of services taking awhile to get up here, but it sure is welcome. As an early bird promotion, Google is cutting the normal subscription rate from $9.99 to $7.99, and tossing in 30 days of service for free. You'll also get Chromecast support as usual, plus, as of recently, you can stream out to Sonos.

Beats Music has updated to version 2.0, and the highlight of the update is native iPad support. The iPad version includes all of the features of the original app, taking advantage of the iPad's larger screen to show you more and speed up navigation.